EVENTS

People who should be publicly loathed

Yet another data point in the there-is-no-God because she would never let-this-asshole-keep-breathing conjecture. Pity the zillionaires, like poor lil ole AIG head-honcho Robert Benmosche:

Matt Taibbi — Now a third AIG executive enters the pantheon of tone-deaf AIG bigwigs: CEO Robert Benmosche, who just told the Wall Street Journal that the post-crash public outcry over the use of bailout money to pay bonuses to executives in Cassano’s Financial Products unit was comparable to – get this – lynchings in the deep south. From reporter Leslie Scism’s interview:“The uproar over bonuses “was intended to stir public anger, to get everybody out there with their pitch forks and their hangman nooses, and all that – sort of like what we did in the Deep South [decades ago]. And I think it was just as bad and just as wrong.“

Some of my friends in the securities racket have tried to half-ass defended the bankstas by saying most are paying or have paid the public’s investments back. Yes, sure, and of course they did it all by their lonesome, by the sole sweat of their furrowed brow. Taxpayers provided no interest multi-billion dollar loans, not exactly hard to make money in that deal, more taxpayer money stabilized the economy giving the banks and insurance companies a running chance, even more taxpayer billions bought up all the toxic investments relieving them of the bad bets and alowwing only the good ones to stand. This was all done with money borrowed and secured by taxpayers, on the Faith and Credit of We the People built up over two centuries, and sure enough, hoddamn, these money wizards took care of everything else, all by themselves.

Genius, sheer unadulterated genius.

Of course that’s just the first act. In act two the same geniuses go on to lecture us taxpayers about the evils of taxpayers taking on debt, scold us night and day on the perils of deregulation, remind us of the integrity of the bonus, and how looking over their shoulder if we’re gonna be on the hook squelches the magic of the super-duper free market profiteering scheme. And that’s when they and their enablers aren’t threatening to tank our credit and comparing us to Nazis or a confederate lynch mob … I just loathe these fucking assholes.

Comments

One of the areas where the Obama administration fell well short was in not making sure that there were consequences for taking the economy. Every single CEO/Chair of a financial corporations should have lost his job. Failure to do so creates what is known as moral hazard. I.e. since there were no consequences to crashing the economy and in fact, the managerial class made out quite well, they have incentives to do it again.

At the same time, Tim Geithner argued that homeowners with underwater mortgages shouldn’t be bailed out with reworked mortgages because it would create moral hazard. What obtuse assholes.

It’s high time these disingenuous fucks get that to which they like to compare public outcry: mobs with pitchfork equivalents. Time for you to go or I will jab you in the arse. They think the violence they do is A-OK because it is done by pushing around bits of paper, concepts, and computational bits.